Not to be a picker of nits, and I do not know if the phrase is used anymore, but pre flop raising used to be called “raising the blind”. I distinctly remember some pro or other on tv saying something along the lines of: “don’t raise my blind, I will defend it”. 
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I know it’s the rules…but i like to believe there’s still some decorum involved in this game of gentlemen (and ladies) Raises are fair when the hands calls for it. But bullies often don’t have good cards, they just have big bankrolls and squeeze wins from those with small chip counts, who are playing small-pot games for fun. It’s like a heavyweight trained boxer, sparring with a light novice, and using powerful blows and kicks.
You must be new to poker and re-play my friend------THEY are Donks n usually no poker skills or just ppl. who like to make it miserable for us normal ppl.
This is totally not true. You need to understand the basics of the game.
1 ~ Ring tables have buy-in limits. It does not matter how big your bankroll is. The only way to get a bigass stack at the table is to win at that table.
2 ~ Tournaments all get the same starting stacks, again regardless of bankrolls. The only way to get a bigass stack is to win hands in that tournament.
3 ~ Players who consistently splash (bet large/huge) pre-flop lose more often than they win.
4 ~ Players with larger bankrolls don’t waste much time at lower stakes. Why bother winning 1000 chips an hour at 5/10 when one can win 5000 chips an hour at 50/100? And if a high roller does show up to play like a maniac, it’s GOOD for the serious low stakes players because that kind of play is easy to beat. These players bombing pots at low stakes are loose fishy players who are easily exploitable. Just play really tight and call/raise them with strong made hands. It’s the easiest thing in the world. Yes, you will get sucked out here and there but it won’t take long to make a bunch of money off of these players. ; )
Totally agree with everything you said except this:
The most profitable line is not actually to play tight, and you shouldn’t usually be doing much calling. Playing tight does eventually win chips against these players, but everything wins chips against these players. Counter intuitively, playing tight is actually higher variance and less profitable than raising quite wide.
eg: the top 5% of hands (88+, AQs+, KQs, AKo) has 73% equity against any 2 cards. If you raise any ace, any suited king, any pair and any double broadway hand, that’s 30% of hands and you have 60% equity against any 2. You get to play 6 times more hands and the equity doesn’t really shift that much. That’s going to both significantly increase your average winnings and also decrease the variance.
Love this advise, building up similar standard players as friends will bring rewards more valuable than chips.
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My wife (moorhen8) and I worked for several years in a poker room of a tribal casino on California’s Central Coast, and we weren’t sure what to expect from Replay … now, 8 years later, we use the site every day … we are retired and the RP experience has been very helpful, especially the RP community within which we have made many friends from all across the planet … the site isn’t always perfect but it’s exponentially better than other sites, and RP users are generally friendlier than elsewhere in the poker cyber world … the bullies are fun to watch, especially the ones who can’t seem to help themselves when it comes to criticizing other people’s play … which reminds from a live tournament many years ago at a riverside casino in Laughlin, when at the final table I called a man’s all-in bet with a suited 9-J and made the flush on the river; the all-in bettor showed AA, then flew into a tirade … and older gentleman at the table quietly chastised the rager, saying “No need to criticize just because YOU don’t understand a player’s decisions.”
John Lankford
(grayball)
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Below is a suggestion that will help if you don’t like the “bullying”. That’s what it is, but that’s the NL HoldEm game. Jonathan Little, Alexander Fitzergerald’s and others books on exploitative play pretty much say what others above are saying; if you want to win HoldEm play that way.
My suggestion is to play Omaha Hi Lo. There is far more variance from pre-flop to flop equity and then on the turn and river than HoldEm. So I regularly see players come in with the HoldEm strategy in Hi Lo have very large chip variance due to the card variance. Plus bluffing doesn’t work nearly as much when you can win 1/2 the pot hi or low (low only made 70% of the time). A nut low will destroy the bluffs and isn’t that uncommon. So those HoldEm exploitative players blow up most (>80%) of the time. THe rest of the time, even if you have a large stack advantage going to the final table, one or two hands can and do change that.
For Omaha Hi, there is more correlation between preflop and flop equity than hi lo, so more exploitative play but not full on helps. (Habagger’s book on pot limit Omaha Hi gets into that.)
I come to this site to enjoy myself and have made enough chips that I can play forever. About all I want to do. So I love the site.
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Betting is a poker skill. Best to play limit tables if you do not appreciate the basics of no limit poker. What you call bully play is actually how real poker is played. Words like punish and bully are key components of professional poker play.
Why do tables have titles like 100 200 blind or whatever it may be. Why.
It tells a player what the minimum bet is. at a 100 200 table you can bet 201 chips but not 199.
More importantly, it lets you know how much players should expect to buy-in for. At a 100/200 table the maximum buy-in is 40,000 chips; at a 200/400 table the maximum is 80k and so on.
As a general rule, it’s not advisable to sit in any ring game where your bankroll is less than 10 max buy-ins.
i guess just play at a smaller table:).